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The impossible voyages of Jules Verne

Jules Verne is familiar to most of us as the creator of Phileas Fogg and Captain Nemo, but there's a world of lesser-known Jules Verne novels which deserve to be remembered, says SF author and Verne translator Adam Roberts

Jules Verne's grave: the writer's reputation rests on just a handful of books from a much larger ouevre

Ask an Englishman to name a French writer of science fiction and he is likely to answer: Jules Verne (ask him to name another French writer of science fiction and he'll probably go 'that guy who wrote the book on which Planet of the Apes was based, him, you know, him, can't recall his name right now'). In fact France has a rich tradition of science fiction going all the way back to Cyrano de Bergerac in the 17th century and continuing without a break right up to the present day. We might wonder why an entire literary tradition has been shrunk, in the English imagination, to a single writer. We might also wonder why that writer's enormous output - more than 50 novels - has been reduced to a handful of titles: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Verne is famous today as the inventor of Phileas Fogg, and of Captain Nemo, and for little else. It's unfair, for not only did Verne write much more than this, he wrote much better.

Why, from his large output, are those few titles the ones still remembered? The answer is clear enough: cinema. Those are the three books that have been filmed most often and most memorably, the ones that lend themselves best to filmic spectacle - the wondrous subterranean caverns and prehistoric monsters of the first, the aquarium of splendours in the second, the scenic travelogue of the third. And it is true that, better than almost any writer of the 19th century, Verne knew how to stage the sort of spectacular 'event' that blockbuster cinema was later to make central to its artform. His novels are full of objects on the grandest scale: the giant cannon in Anti-Topsy-Turvy (1889) designed to be fired so its recoil will jolt the earth out of its angle of rotation, stabilise the seasons and free up millions of acres in the polar latitudes for cultivation; the massive artificial island built to travel about the Pacific in Propeller Island (1895); the huge aeroplane, made of a kind of treated papier-mache, that has the potential to dominate the world from the sky in Master of the World (1904) and my personal favourite, the 'steam elephant' in The Steam House (1880), a pachyderm-sized mechanical contrivance in which an engineer named Banks travels around northern India.

But there is more to Verne than big guns and big machines. Indeed, the cinema has not been a friend to Verne's true skill; it flattens his achievement, seeing him capable only of widescreen effects. In fact his writing, though rarely stylistically elevated, achieves brilliant and memorable metaphorical and even poetic effects. Of Verne's novels there are two that achieve a unique blend of pseudo-technical precision and almost surreal metaphorical sweep. Since they've never been filmed they are practically unknown. But they deserve to be remembered.

One is the strangely named The Begum's Five Hundred Million (1879), in which a Frenchman, Dr François Sarrasin, and a German, Professor Schultz, inherit a massive fortune from the titular Begum (Hindustani for queen). Each uses his portion of the money to build ideal communities in the wilderness of the American northwest: Sarrasin builds the idyllic, pastoral 'France-ville' and Schultz constructs Stahlstadt ('Steeltown'); a place of rigid mechanisation and ruthless adherence to social and technological order. The main output of Stahlstadt is weaponry, including a gigantic cannon with which Schultz intends to destroy France-ville by firing an enormous shell filled with compressed carbonic acid to simultaneously gas and freeze the French settlers. But Schultz's evil plans are thwarted by his own incompetence.

The novel was published only a few years after France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the German army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and has been read by some critics as a crude piece of wish-fulfilment. But surely not: the deliberately extrapolated schematism of these binary 'good' and 'bad' cities removes the novel from the realm of political reality; it achieves instead something more lasting, a satirical and strikingly odd interrogation of utopian idealism: the pastoral and the authoritarian.

Much odder is the plot of Hector Servadac (1877). This book has on occasion been published in English under the title Off On A Comet, which, though ungainly, does contain the nub of the story. A comet crashes into the world and scoops up a lump of North Africa and the Mediterranean and carries it into space complete with human survivors. As the comet swings out in through the solar system it becomes colder and colder; the sea freezes, and the humans survive by retreating into a volcanic cave. The comet's two year parabola brings it back, eventually, towards the sun; the world thaws; and the survivors return to Earth by means of hot air balloon. Yes, you read that right.

The comet-to-Earth balloon trip is successful, but stranger things follow. Verne wanted to portray a world still reeling from the devastation caused by the comet's impact; but his publisher Hetzel persuaded him that readers would rebel against such a downbeat conclusion. In the case of Hector Servadac this results in a hallucinatory final chapter, where the returning travellers come back to a world that seems never to have been struck by a comet at all - nobody remembers the catastrophe, the world seems wholly unaffected, and the travellers themselves begin to doubt the veracity of their own experiences.

But this is not mere oddness for oddness' sake; it is a work that captures with considerable force the way catastrophe can come clattering unexpectedly into our lives, and more importantly the way we cling to the remnants of our lives after this catastrophe has struck. Life changing events are by definition estranging, and deeply odd. It takes a properly imaginative, metaphorical literature, like science fiction, to do justice to them. There's something particularly wonderful in seeing Verne's typical scientific clarity of tone used to tell a story so plump with impossibilities - that the comet's impact didn't pulverise, or vaporise, what it struck, that any subsequent fragments retained their water and atmosphere, to say nothing of the impossible interplanetary balloon flight and miraculously undamaged world at the end. It seems to me that this is a novel that not only contains impossibility, but is actually about impossibility; the impossible voyages the imagination is capable of; that charting of impossibility we call science fiction.

· Adam Roberts is a science fiction writer, and Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novels are Gradisil (Gollancz 2006), which was shortlisted for last year's Arthur C Clarke Award, Land of the Headless (Gollancz 2007) and Splinter (Solaris, 2007).

Jules Verne: A life in science fiction

Jules Verne was born in the French port of Nantes in 1828 to affluent parents. In 1839 he tried to run away from home, taking a position as a ship's boy on a vessel bound for India. He was recaptured by his father at Paimboeuf, down the coast from Nantes; in the face of whose displeasure he is supposed to have promised 'je ne voyagerai plus qu'en reve' ('I will no longer travel except in my dreams').

In 1848 Verne moved to Paris determined to make a life as a writer. After a false start as a playwright, Verne established a partnership with the publisher Hetzel (the pseudonym of Pierre Jules Stahl). Together they inaugurated the series Voyages Extraordinaire and began publishing attractively and copiously illustrated multi-volume novels narrating amazing travels. The series became immensely successful and many of Verne's eighty novels proved to be enduring classics - Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre a la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea1869-70); Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872); L'Ile Mysterieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874); Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Begum (The Begum's Five Hundred Million, 1879) and Maitre du Monde (Master of the World, 1904).

Verne's works have been widely adapted for cinema and television, and continue to be popular today. He died in 1905.